Publishing Archaeology

Sunday, February 4, 2018

I am skeptical about the hype
surrounding the recent press release from the National Geographic Society about
the new findings of LiDAR survey in the Maya region of northern Guatemala. I
have no reason to question the quality of the LiDAR survey, or its potential
usefulness for understanding aspects of ancient Maya society in this region.
Rather, I question two aspects of the way these new findings have been
portrayed, both in the NGS press release and in the journalism that has
resulted from the find. (1) This is portrayed as revealing brand-new ideas, when in fact earlier LiDAR work had very similar results; and (2) The work is portrayed as a major scientific discovery, when in fact it is only the first step of a process, the end result of which will be (one hopes) some major scientific discoveries.

LiDAR is a relatively new airborne
remote sensing technology that permits detailed mapping of the surface of the
earth at a detailed scale. It is far superior to earlier forms of satellite or
airplane mapping in that LiDAR can penetrate dense vegetation. It is ideal for
the Maya lowlands, where the jungle vegetation hinders traditional mapping.
Wherever it has been applied, in the Maya area, the result is the
identification of many new houses and features of the built environment. (1) This
is my
first misgiving: the lack of acknowledgement that Mayanists have been
working with LiDAR for more than seven years (Chase
et al. 2012; Chase et al. 2011).

The NGS story has breathless quotes
about how suddenly we know about many new features and structures on the Maya
landscape. Well, that is what LiDAR does in the Maya lowlands. It finds many more
features than archeologists knew about previously. If archaeologists are
surprised about this, they just haven’t looked at the prior work, both in the
Maya area (Brown et al. 2016; Chase et al.
2014b; Chase et al. 2014a; Chase et al. 2012; Chase et al. 2011; Chase et al.
2016; Chase 2016; Chase and Weishampel 2016; Ebert et al. 2016; Prufer et al.
2015; Von Schwerin et al. 2016; Yaeger et al. 2016), in other parts of
Mesoamerica (Fisher and Leisz 2013; Rosenswig et
al. 2015; Rosenswig et al. 2013), and particularly at Angkor in Cambodia
(Evans et al. 2013; Hanus and Evans 2016).

Lidar-identified small reservoirs at Cacacol. Chase 2016.

One difficulty with LiDAR data is that
while it is easy to see large structures like pyramids in the output data,
small features such as houses or agricultural fields are more difficult to pick
out. They often require a combination of intensive, time-consuming searching by
eye, and sophisticated custom computer algorithms that can pinpoint such
features automatically. For example, my student, Adrian Chase, analyzed LiDAR
data to identify small residential-level reservoirs at the Maya city of Caracol
(Chase 2016). In areas that had been
mapped previously by traditional methods, Adrian’s algorithm identified 25
times the number of small reservoirs at the site! These did not stand out on the
LiDAR landscape like dropped pins in Google-Maps. They had to be painstakingly identified.

As far as I can tell, the intensive
phase of analysis has not yet been carried out (or is not reported in this
press release). It is easy to use LiDAR to find a bunch of new features and
make a pretty map. But the next two steps are more difficult. For the first step, the archaeologist
has to analyze the data—staring at maps and applying algorithms—so that one can
be confident that most of the relevant small features have been identified. The
pretty color maps one sees in all the press accounts are not the only way to
portray spatial data in LiDAR; often other visualization methods are more
useful. Adrian was able to identify all those small reservoirs only because he
did two things: he spent countless hours staring at the output, and he applied
custom computer algorithms to the data to identify the features. There is no
indication that archaeologists have carried out this intensive level of
analysis of the new Guatemalan data.

3 LiDAR visualizations. Chase 2016

A second crucial step
is to analyze the results quantitatively and spatially to construct population
estimates and study the on-the-ground patterning in settlement data. The NGS
article subtitle says there were “millions more people than previously thought.”
The report has this quote:

“Most people had been comfortable with
population estimates of around 5 million,” said [Francisco] Estrada-Belli, who
directs a multi-disciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With
this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15
million people there—including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many
of us had thought uninhabitable.”

It will take quite a bit of analysis to
turn this quick preliminary suggestion into rigorous population estimates for
settlements and regions. These additional steps—technical application of
algorithms, lots of staring at screens, and then quantification and calculation—are
only beginning for the Maya lowlands (Chase
2016; Chase and Weishampel 2016; Ebert et al. 2016), and there is no
sign that they have been accomplished for the new Guatemalan LiDAR results.

LiDAR of central Caracol. Chase et al 2011.

So, what is my beef? The new results
are just in, and the analysis is probably only starting. This is the normal process
of science. (2) My second misgiving is the idea—promoted by NGS, by the people
interviewed in the article, and by secondary articles in the media—that
archaeological advances consist of discoveries in the field. Yes, the fieldwork
is essential. But without an often lengthy period of analysis, one typically
cannot know the meaning or importance of the finds.

There is a kind of archaeology where
the main discovery is made in the field. If one is looking for the tomb of a
king or noble, and one finds it, that may be the essential defining moment of
discovery. But I pursue another kind of archaeology. I have spent my career on
the archaeology of Aztec provincial households. When I dig up another house or
trash midden, it seems pretty much the same as countless I and others have
excavated. They are pretty boring, I have to admit. But once I have spent months
or years studying the artifacts, quantifying them, sending off samples of technical
analyses, only then do I make my discoveries. When I argue that this household
was well-off and that one was poor, or when I argue that conquest by the Aztec
empire had little effect on local people, these are my discoveries. They rely
on extensive analyses of artifacts. I had no idea about these things at the
time of excavation. I discuss this issue—what is the real moment of
discovery?—in more detail in my recent book (Smith
2016).

Social interpretations at Yautepec were based on study of 1 million potsherds

When one focuses almost exclusively on
the actual uncovering of a find during fieldwork (for an excavation), or on the
initial pretty maps of a LiDAR survey—before the hard work of analysis is
done—one is distorting the scientific significance of our work. Will NGS have
a big feature when the archaeologists involved actually publish a revised
population estimate for northern Guatemala, or when they can quantify the
amount of construction in rural vs urban areas?We'll see.

A kind of archaeology based on extensive analysis

How can one spot a finding that seems
spectacular but is actually a preliminary find, not yet analyzed, from a
finding based on proper analysis and interpretation? Peer-review publication is
the primary way to do this. The NGS piece was based entirely on interviews, not
on a paper that has been peer-reviewed and accepted by a scientific journal.

Claims that LiDAR will revolutionize
the study of Maya settlement and demography may very well be correct, but it is
too soon to tell. The Guatemalan LiDAR has reached the stage of preliminary
findings and pretty maps, but not the stage of solid architectural,
demographic, and social findings. I look forward to the scientific results. I
don’t care if they are an internet sensation; I’d rather see them published in
a journal.

References

Brown, M. Kathryn,
Jason Yaeger, and Bernadette Cap

2016 A Tale of Two Cities; LiDAR Survey and New
Discoveries at Xunantunich. Research
Reports in Belizean Archaeology 13: 51-60.

2013 Uncovering archaeological landscapes at Angkor
using lidar. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 110: 12595-12600.

Fisher,
Christopher T. and Stephen J. Leisz

2013 New Perspectives on Purapécha Urbanism through
the Use of LiDAR at the Stie of Angamuco, Mexico. In A Primer on Space
Archaeology: In Observance of the 40th Anniversary of the World Heritage
Convention, edited by D.C. Comer, pp. 191-202. SpringerB riefs in
Archaeology, vol. 5. Springer, New Yokr.

Friday, December 29, 2017

I just read a strange and inflammatory
paper by Esther Pasztory in the Mexican journal, Anales de Antropología(Pasztory 2017). Pasztory, a senior art historian and
Teotihuacan scholar, raises questions about the scholarship and perhaps the
ethics of two other top Teotihuacan scholars, René Millon (deceased) and George
Cowgill. I have three main questions about this paper:

1. Did Millon really steal her ideas? (the answer is, no).

2. Did Cowgill refuse to give her
sufficient credit for her insights? (the
answer is, no).

3. Why would a reputable journal
publish this paper? (the answer is, I have no idea).

Rene Millon

This paper focuses on the notion that
the government and society of ancient Teotihuacan were more collective or
corporate than most ancient societies. This view has been gaining in popularity
recently. Pasztory claims to have invented the idea although the published
record casts doubt on her claim. Pasztory’s 1987 book was a major early
statement of this position. Cowgill (but not Millon) also contributed to the growing
consensus that Teotihuacan may have had a more collective form of rule, using
the term “oligarchy” and comparing Teotihuacan to Rennaissance Venice in
several works. In recent years, Linda Manzanilla has been the major proponent
of the collective rule position (Froese et al.
2014; Manzanilla 2002, 2006, 2015), and David Carballo has at least one paper
in press arguing for collective rule at the site (see also Carballo 2016). This is not by any means a
unanimous viewpoint; Saburo Sugiyama is the most vocal proponent of the
single-king autocratic model for Teotihuacan (Sugiyama
2005, 2013; Sugiyama and Cabrera Castro 2007). Personally, I am on the
fence. I think the collective model is probably valid, but I do not feel that
the arguments in its favor have been particularly strong in empirical terms.

Pasztory has a variety of complaints
about Millon and Cowgill. I will limit myself to the most egregious.

Complaint #1: Cowgill ignores her ideas
and work.

George Cowgill

The impetus for this article was the
publication of Cowgill’s recent synthesis of research on Teotihuacan (Cowgill 2015), which—she claims—ignores her and
does not cite her enough times. She claims that the notion of collective rule
was her idea in the first place: “esta
idea fuse de mi autoría” (p. 219), or, “Soy
la responsible del origen de algunas de las ideas centrales sobre la naturaleza
de Teotihuacan” (p. 217). Cowgill discusses the collective rule idea, but
does not cite Pasztory as its originator.

If one just reads Pasztory’s paper and
looks at Cowgill’s book, one could come to divergent conclusions. First, only
two of her works are cited in the bibliography, so perhaps she is correct about
being ignored or slighted. But her six entries in the index are only exceeded
by a greater number of entries for René Millon and Saburo Sugiyama. That is,
Cowgill mentions her by name more than any other scholar except for these two.
He clearly does take her seriously.

Let’s look at the history of George
Cowgill’s ideas about collective rule at Teotihuacan. I will be brief here; however,
it would be useful to write a more scholarly account in the future.

(Cowgill 1983)– In this discussion of government at Teotihuacan, focusing
on the architectural compound known as the Ciudadela, Cowgill does not
specifically use the terms collective or corporate rule. But he was clearly
exploring the concept of non-autocratic rule, talking about how there may have
been powerful individuals ruling the state instead of a single ruler. Instead
of saying the Sun Pyramid was built by a single ruler, he says it was initiated
by “persons.” He talks about the possibility of priest-rulers and uses the
concept theocracy. He talks about rule by a variety of officials. To me, it looks
like he was exploring the notion of collective rule, but without the benefit of
an appropriate label or concept. I must admit that I never liked this paper; I
thought the writing was wishy-washy, and at the time was convinced that
rulership must have been despotic. But then we all thought like that back in
the early 1980s.

1983-1991:
Cowgill was publishing methodological papers and some quantitative studies of
Teotihuacan during these years. He did not give much attention to Teotihuacan
government.

(Cabrera Castro et al. 1991) – Cowgill and his coauthors talk about “a shift to more
emphasis on a collective, group-oriented ethos” (p. 89) for Teotihuacan society
and government.

(Cowgill 1992) – He cites Pasztory as suggesting a more corporate
orientation for Teotihuacan rule. He quotes Millon (Millon 1981) as acknowledging that Teotihuacan rule might have
been either “individual or collective” (Cowgill 1992:98).

(Cowgill 1997) – This is a major scholarly review article on “society and
state” at Teotihuacan. He includes significant discussion of possibilities for
collective rule, citing seven works by Pasztory. This is the place where
Cowgill gives Pasztory’s views their most detailed consideration. He cites her
newly-published book, which contains the fullest exposition of her views (Pasztory 1997). Although Pasztory does not
cite this paper in her recent article, she might not consider the level of
coverage of her ideas sufficient because—as in his book—Cowgill does not state
explicitly that collective rule was her idea in the first place (Pasztory 2017:219). But, if my interpretation
of Cowgill’s 1983 paper is correct, then he was exploring these concepts himself
before she put her ideas into print.

So, why did Cowgill give Pasztory’s
work such short shrift in his 2015 book? At least half of his mentions are
critiques of her ideas about various notions, including the Great Goddess
concept. I would suggest that he had explored her ideas previously and found them
inadequate for his understanding of Teotihuacan society. I have a similar view,
which I will describe below.

Complaint #2: Millon stole her ideas

According to Pasztory (p. 218), Millon
read the draft of a chapter, subsequently published as (Pasztory 1988). She does not provide a date, but 1986 or 1987
would sound appropriate. The chapter described her ideas about collective rule,
but Millon is said to have expressed vehement opposition to this concept (“se opuso vehementemente a la idea”, p.
218). Then, at the Dumbarton Oaks conference on Teotihuacan in 1988, she was
surprised to hear Millon talk about collective rule at Teotihacan, while
failing to give her any credit for the idea! (“sin darme ningún crédito por la idea”). Now these events are
difficult to reconstruct today without a lot of interviews and piecing together
the story. But I don’t think stories like this have much importance. What is
important is the published record. What did Millon say in the published version
of his paper and in other publications?

(Millon 1981) – I first go back in time to an earlier paper, not cited by
Pasztory. In this review article, Millon states in passing that rulership at
Teotihuacan could have been either “individual or collective” (p. 212). Millon
was clearly thinking about this issue long before reading Pasztory’s
unpublished chapter. But he does not develop the idea in this paper. As
mentioned above, Cowgill (1992) later cited Millon (1981) as mentioning
collective rule.

(Millon 1992) – This paper from the Dumbarton Oaks volume is a lengthy
and detailed analysis of several decades of research at Teotihuacan. It is the
published version of the conference talk in which Millon reportedly discussed Pasztory’s
ideas without citation or credit. Millon devotes five pages (pp. 371-375) to
the ideas of Pasztory about Teotihuacan society and rule! He cites six of her
publications! This is hardly ignoring her, and far from stealing her ideas. He
organizes her ideas into four main claims, analyzes them, and concludes that
one claim survives the evidence, two are contradicted by evidence, and one
survives, but is better explained in a different way. My interpretation of
Millon’s complaints about Pasztory’s work (which I report from my 1990’s
annotations in the margin of the article) is that it is insufficiently
anthropological and too subjective. (One other relevant factor: As I know from recent experience, speakers are not given a great amount of time at Dumbarton Oaks conferences, and the schedule is followed tightly. One simply does not have time for a lot of scholarly citations in these oral presentations.)

So, did Millon steal the ideas of
Pasztory? Hardly. In the 1992 chapter, he discussed the collective rule idea,
engaging closely with her publications. But he is not convinced. Sadly, this
was René Millon’s final major paper on Teotihuacan.He
never articulated an integrated vision of government at Teotihuacan.

What are the main issues here?

(1) Humanities vs. social scientific scholarship. Pasztory seems to think that if she came up with an idea
first, anyone who later engages with that idea must cite her as having
originated it. Apart from the idea of whether she was indeed the first to
propose a collective model for Teotihuacan, her expectations are out of step
with the standard model of research and citation in the social sciences. When I
write about the Aztec empire as being an indirectly control empire, I don’t
feel the need to go back and cite the first person who may have proposed that
idea (Ross Hassig, although he used the term “hegemonic empire.”) If I am
writing a history of scholarship on the topic, of course I’ll credit Hassig.
But if I am just going about my scholarly business today, I don’t need to
invoke his name every time I talk about the organization of the empire. Perhaps
in the humanities, the person who first articulates a concept needs to be
acknowledged all the time. But, in the social sciences, the crucial issue is
empirical: What do the data show? Both Millon and Cowgill examined Pasztory’s
ideas and evidence carefully, and concluded that they were not needed in order
to make their arguments. We lack later papers by Millon, but Cowgill’s
trajectory is clear: he talks about her ideas in a 1997 review article, and
then later references them only where he feels the need.

(2) Professional pride.
Pasztory clearly feels that Millon and Cowgill insulted her professional pride
by not giving her ideas enough consideration or citation. But, I think my
chronological discussion above show that neither scholar was remiss in
discussing her ideas and works. Should Cowgill have cited her more extensively
in his book? He doesn’t really deal much with the history of interpretations of
Teotihuacan, so I don’t fault him there.

(3) Collective rule at Teotihuacan. I am an agnostic when it comes to the collective rule
interpretation of Teotihuacan. It has become something of a bandwagon. As a
curmudgeon, I have a strong dislike for bandwagons. I prefer to sit back,
consider the evidence, and write critiques of poorly supported popular notions.
When I first moved back to Teotihuacan scholarship a couple of years ago, I
eagerly went through Pastory’s main book (Pasztory
1997). Given my documented infatuation with Blanton and Fargher’s model (Blanton and Fargher 2008), I wanted to review
and synthesize the evidence for collective rule at Teotihuacan. But I was
disappointed. The book has some insights, but to me, most of her evidence is subjective
and open to multiple interpretations. I didn’t find much that I consider
rigorous empirical evidence to support a collective model for Teotihuacan
government. I do cite her work, though, because her book remains an important work. I feel that archaeologists have yet to develop sufficiently rigorous
methods to identify collective vs. autocratic rule with confidence, using
archaeological evidence. I have read works by Manzanilla, Carballo, Blanton,
Fargher, Feinman, and others on this issue, but I remain unconvinced. My gut
feeling is that the collective model fits Teotihuacan better than the
autocratic model. But I have not seen a sufficiently rigorous study, with
enough evidence to convince me. (Yes, I know these people are probably frustrated at my curmudgeonly approach here. My mantra is, "Show me the data!").

(4) Why did Anales de
Antropología publish this piece?
It looks like no one checked Pasztory’s accusations against the published
record. It would be useful if someone were to write a history of ideas about
Teotihuacan government and society. But unfortunately, much of this paper sounds
petty and unprofessional. It is published in a peer-reviewed journal, but was
this paper subject to outside review? I have no idea.

REFERENCES:

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F.
Fargher

2008 Collective Action in the Formation of
Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

2016Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico. Oxford University Press, New York.

Cowgill, George L.

1983 Rulership
and the Ciudadela: Political Inferences from Teotihuacan Architecture. In Civilization
in the Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, edited by Richard M.
Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, pp. 313-344. University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque.

1992 Toward
a Political History of Teotihuacan.
In Ideology and Pre-Columbian
Civilizations, edited by Arthur A. Demarest and Geoffrey W. Conrad, pp.
87-114. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe.

1997 State
and Society at Teotihuacan, Mexico. Annual
Review of Anthropology 26: 129-161.

2015 Ancient Teotihuacan: Early Urbanism in
Central Mexico. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Froese, Tom, Carlos Gershenson, and
Linda R. Manzanilla

2014 Can
Government Be Self-Organized? A Mathematical Model of the Collective Social
Organization of Ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico. PloS one 9 (10): e109966.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

What is the value of archaeology for individuals, institutions, and disciplines beyond archaeology itself? This is the topic of a recent article in The SAA Archaeological Record (Minnis et al. 2017), based on a workshop held at the Amerind Foundation in May 2017. If you have followed this blog at all, you will know this is a topic I am very concerned with. The blog has 43 entries for the keyword "Archaeology and other disciplines", and 17 entries for "Archaeology and the public." I've published a number of papers on this topic, including one I had forgotten about until tonight (see bibliography below). So I was pleased to see this paper and eager to read it. But then I was surprised, or perhaps shocked is a better term, to see that the paper has almost NO consideration of the aspect of the topic that is most important to me: The use of archaeology by scholars in other disciplines to address a variety of historical and social issues.

the Amerind Foundation, one of my favorite places

This paper, authored by a distinguished group of archaeologists, consists largely of two lists (with discussion of the entries).

Provide methods,
techniques and approaches used in a wide variety of non-archaeologal endeavors

Engage K-12 students

Offer a multidisciplinary
problem-based approach at the intersection of science and the humanities

Promote heritage tourism

Give decision-makers,
planners, and the public a significant deep-time perspective on key issues.

Second, the Constituencies/Audiences/Stakeholders of archaeology are (pp. 292-31):

Policy Makers and
Implementers

Business

Educators/Students

Practitioners

Communities

Funders

Military

Media

I don't want to denigrate any of these areas of relevance or constituencies; these are all important things. But, just where is the SCIENTIFIC VALUE OF ARCHAEOLOGY? That is, where is the discussion of the value of archaeological data and concepts for understanding issues in other disciplines within the natural and social sciences (or the humanities, for that matter)? Not in this paper.

Now, there is a short section that suggests archaeologist should "link natural and human ecosystems through a landscape perspective in order to facilitate outreach to and interaction with other disciplines" ((p.30). This is a worthwhile goal, but it does not describe how I strive to relate my archaeology of ancient states and empires to the historical and social scientific communities and disciplines.

I would like to think that research by me and my colleagues on ancient cities, putting them into a framework that connects to research on contemporary urbanism, might be a way that archaeology has value beyond archaeology. Urban planners, sociologists, geographers, political scientists, and complexity scientists have used archaeological data in their work, largely because some of us have promoted the value of archaeology in these and other disciplines through publishing in their journals and interacting with colleagues (Smith 2011).

Tim Kohler and I recently organized a group of colleagues to publish a paper on ancient wealth inequality in the journal Nature (Kohler et al. 2017). This paper has generated considerable interest beyond archaeology. We have given many interviews and participated in radio and internet programs (I see this as my 15 minutes of fame). Tim was interviewed on All Things Considered! But I have also had contact with a variety of scholars in other disciplines who are interested in our work, and anxious to see the edited volume now in press (Kohler and Smith 2018). This particular set of archaeological findings is valuable, relevant, and of great interest to scholars in other disciplines. It forms a major contribution (IMHO) to the field of study of comparative and historical patterns of inequality. Yet, for Minnis et al. (2017), this kind of work is not an example of archaeology being of value beyond archaeology!

Graph from Nature

Coming soon to a bookstore near you

If you are interested in MY approach to the value of archaeology beyond archaeology, check out my other blog, Wide Urban World. The basic premise is that urbanism and settlements form a domain of analysis, a "wide urban world," that encompasses the distant past, the recent past, the present, and the future. My assumption is that the archaeology of settlements is indeed of interest beyond archaeology. I'm not the only one working and publishing in this area (relating archaeological findings to those of other disciplines), but our work is left out of the recent paper by Minnis et al. I guess we need to not only convince economists or sociologists or ecologists of the value of our work, but we also need to convince some of our archaeological colleagues.

Sunday, November 19, 2017

I saw a tweet a week or two ago about the upcoming TAG ("Theoretical Archaeology Group") conference. I made an offhand negative comment, which set off a series of negative tweets about me.

"Wow, not a single session I'd want to attend! Am I just out of it, or is "theoretical archaeology" out of it???

I tried to engage with my critics, but it just led to accusations that I am a troll and a bully. Finally I tweeted "I give up." So, I thought I would put down some of the reasons I dislike TAG, and some comments on social media.

Social media first.Here are a few things I dislike. Please note that my reference here is social media in relation to professional and scholarly issues.

(1) Ad hominem attacks. As soon as I made a negative remark about TAG, I was attacked personally. I must be a bad person. I should shut up. This attitude is antithetical to science and scholarship.

It's really unfortunate when senior scholars would rather bully and troll than actually have conversations.

I guess my initial tweet shows that I am a bully and a troll. Huh??

(2) Sensibility is more important than facts. My tone of voice had negative overtones (which shows I am a bad person). Maybe I should be more careful in my phrasing so as not to suggest anything negative about anyone or anything.

came across snooty, elitist and arrogant. Like othet people's ideas arent good enough for you

This is TWITTER, with short cryptic statements. I don't agonize over proper phrasing. I tend to be a direct person, and I try to express myself clearly. Again, the dominance of sensibility over content is antithetical to science and scholarship.

(3) There are "Like" buttons, but no "Dislike" buttons. This is built into social media today. You can like something, but there is no way to express dislike other than some kind of comment or textual response. Criticism and questioning are of less importance than joining a band-wagon. Again, this attitude is antithetical to science and scholarship.

TAG

To start with, if you care about how I think about theory, science, scholarship, and archaeology, please read my publications. I am a scholar, and what I say in Tweets (and in this blog) is ephemeral. I do discuss real issues here, but what matters is the published record. So, please look at the three papers cited below for my views on theory. These should make it clear why I dislike TAG. But here is a quick version.

First, for me, theory is a tool, something archaeologists use to learn about the past. The domain of "archaeological theory" is pretty small (ideas about formation of the archaeological record, recovery methods, etc.), but the domain of productive theory for archaeologists is huge. It encompasses many disciplines, from political science to ecology, from urban planning to geomorphology, from cultural anthropology to complex systems theory. For many or most people into TAG, archaeology theory is something important on its own, not just a tool to use to explain our findings. Instead of using theory to explain data (the norm in the social sciences), many archaeologists want to use data to "theorize" an issue. My goal is not to create more theory, but to use LESS THEORY (Besbris, Max and Shamus Khan, 2017, Less Theory. More Description. Sociological Theory 35(2):147-153), or Healy, Kieran, 2017, F**k Nuance. Sociological Theory 35(2):118-127.

Second, most theory considered at TAG is interpretivist, humanities-based high-level social theory. What is wrong with that? Read my publications. If you want to speculate about the human condition, such theory is great stuff, but if you want to provide rigorous explanations of human behavior and society, it is all but worthless. Please check the citations in my articles about this. My claims may seem outrageous to TAG types, but I am just repeating standard social-science epistemology.

Here are some comments from my Twitter detractors.

(1) I should engage with TAG, go to a meeting. Here is my reply:

Because most TAG sessions are epistemologically incompatible with my own perspective. Not worth my time to sit through such sessions. If others care about my views, they should read my publications, e.g., ((I provide links to my 2015 and 2017 papers in the tweet)).

(2) I should open myself up to different perspectives and points of view

what's wrong with exposing yourself to new ideas? If you only ever listen to people lile yourself its kinda dull

I have spent a career listening to the postprocessualists, actor-network theory, materiality, and such, and I have rarely found much of use or of interest in this material. Yet given the trandisciplinary turn of my own research trajectory since moving to ASU in 2005, I would guess that I have exposed myself to more new ideas in that period than most archaeologists. Read my publications.

(3) I am arguing for a single narrow view of archaeology that excludes many, "including a lot of marginalized voices." My response to this has two components: (A) for the kind of empirical social-science research that I favor, I believe strongly that the kind of epistemology and theory I promote is the most productive approach. (B) for other kinds of approaches to archaeology, with other goals, other approaches are fine.

I appreciate a lot of your work, but you draw these boundaries and say that it's the only real or valuable archaeology and it leaves a lot of the discipline out, including a lot of marginalized voices. I think you can dislike something without being dismissive of it.

So, here we are back to sensibilities. If you care at all about these issues, please read my publications, and forget about Twitter (or this blog). You can look at my series of three posts about my view of a scientific archaeology:

The 2017 publication covers these issues in a more compact form (although the blog posts do have much more complete bibliogrphies, given the limitations on the Antiquity paper). and the earlier papers have more on the structure of arguments (2015) and the nature of non-asbtract theory (2011).

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

I started this blog ten years ago with a quote from my father-in-law, James E. Heath: "If it's not published, it's not science." That seemed a good entry into issues of publishing in archaeology, a way to promote my own scientific perspective on archaeology. Dad Heath died this week, so I want to look at aspects of his career and life that have been influential in my own development as a scholar and scientist.

James E. Heath

My wife Cindy can be very traditional about things. When I asked her to marry me, her answer was a tentative yes. I had to ask her father for his blessing. I was nervous of course, Not only was he an imposing figure and her father, but he was also Head of the Physiology Department at the University of Illinois and I was a mere graduate student. I honestly don't recall the details of our little chat, but I guess it worked out well, since Cindy and I are still married after more than 30 years. But I do remember that shortly after our talk, he said to me, "It would have been simpler if I had just asked to see your CV."

One of the lessons I learned from Jim Heath was the importance of rigor and quality of research and publication. He edited a journal for many years (Journal of Thermobiology, I think it was), he got million-dollar grants, and he was a serious and productive scientist (temperature regulation was his field, if you haven't guessed). One of the reasons I get so fed up with much archaeology today is that his values of rigor and quality are too often lacking among my colleagues. Why do journals publish such crap? How do people get grants to do such poorly conceived research? How can an article win a prize when it has NO DATA? I get exercised about these things in part because of Jim Heath's influence on my attitude toward research and science.

He was my academic mentor. I would ask him about issues and quandaries, and I valued his advice. I was once asked to evaluate a colleague (at another university) for promotion to Full Professor. I did not have much respect for this person's work; in fact I had used one of his/her articles in a seminar as a negative example--how NOT to write an article. I was a newly-promoted Professor, so I asked some of my senior colleagues at SUNY-Albany what to do. They all said to duck the task - say I was too busy and avoid writing a critical letter. I asked Dad about this, and he said that I should accept the invitation. They wanted my professional opinion, and I should give them what they asked for. It was my professional responsibility. But what was I going to say? This person has few grants, few publications, and their work is of low quality? Tact is not a quality I am known for (some of you are probably laughing here, thinking, "That's an understatement!"). I worried about writing a strongly negative letter. He gave me some help with ways of phrasing my remarks that didn't sound so harsh, but made the point clearly. I have recalled his advice usefully at various points in my career.

It was also fun to have a father-in-law who had carried out a famous experiment, known as the "beer-can experiment." Evidently claims had been made that reptiles actually do regulate their temperature (contrary to accepted knowledge) based on some experimental results of measuring their temperature throughout the day in the sun. Dad's paper (Heath 1964) describes an experiment in which he measured the temperature of a beer can in the sun, that found the same results as the reptile studies. So if those results mean that reptiles can thermoregulate, then so can beer cans! What a great experiment. And who says that beer does not contribute to science.

Jim Heath studied temperature regulation in all kinds of animals, from insects to polar bears. I remember stories about taking the rectal temperature of hibernating bears. Evidently there were some bears in the Midwest who hibernated in known locations in barns, and the farmers let crazy physiologists come study them. I think hibernation is a big deal for research on temperature regulation. So how do you take the rectal temperature of a hibernating bear? The obvious answer is that you have a graduate student do the task! I recall a story about a graduate student being lowered into the depths of a barn on a rope, armed with a thermometer for the bear.

Moving from bears to insects, my in-laws spent a lot of time studying cicadas in the U.S. Southwest. My mother-in-law, Maxine Heath, is an entomologist whose specialty is the systematics of North American cicacas (Sanborm and Heath 2012). So the two of them would do a cicada run each year, studying and collecting in a series of locations across the southwest. One question they have worked on is the temperature at which cicadas became active. I've been out with them once or twice, and Cindy has helped out numerous times. And they managed to take all the grandchildren out on a research trip. Here is how the fieldwork goes. They drive around the desert, listening for singing cicadas. When they find some, they note the conditions (species of tree, ambient temperature, sun or shade, etc.) and then collect one or two specimens. These are put in the ice chest, with the beer and sandwiches, to cool them off. The cicadas get cold and inactive (I think torpor is the technical term). At the end of the day, back in a motel room, you take the cold and sluggish bugs out of the cooler and start throwing them up in the air above the bed. At first they just fall back onto the bed. But when they have warmed up enough, they start to fly instead of just falling down. You grab them and take their temperature, which tells you at what temperature they become active. Whenever anyone suggests that archaeological fieldwork is strange, I think of this biological fieldwork. I just hope they keep the curtains closed while the bug-throwing is going on.

While I appreciate these and other stories from my father-in-laws's research career, what I most value is the professional advice he gave me, and the lessons I learned just from talking with him and hearing him talk about science, about publishing, and professional life. I would like to think that some of the ranting and raving I have done in this blog--in the name of quality and rigor in archaeology--derive from what I learned at family gatherings. I still think Jim Heath's statement to me years ago -- "If it't not published, it's not science" -- is valid and relevant to what we do as archaeologists. RIP.

About This Blog

This blog contains information and opinions (mostly mine) on professional publishing issues in archaeology. I am especially concerned with quality control (epistemology, rigor, and such), open access, and communication with other disciplines.

About Me

I am an archaeologist who works on Aztec sites and Teotihuacan.I do comparative and transdisciplinary research on cities, and also households, empires, and city-states. I view my discipline, archaeology, as a Comparative Historical Social Science.
My home pageMy papers to downloadMy page on Academia.edu
Twitter: @MichaelESmith
I am Professor in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University; Affiliated Faculty in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning; Fellow, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems; Core Faculty in the Center for Social Dynamics Complexity. Also, I have an affiliation with the Colegio Mexiquense in Toluca, Mexico.